What Stops You From Measuring Training Effectiveness?

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It is the question of ownership. As long as there is ambiguity amongst stakeholders – Learning and Development team, Business, Participant, leaders – regarding who is responsible to measure effectiveness of training provided, the level of learning maturity is highly questionable.

Once the following fundamental questions are answered, the battle is half won and to rationalize the responses and allocate responsibility consider the needs listed below.

Who owns measurement of training effectiveness?
Who owns assessment of training needs in alignment with business needs?
Who owns validating any training request that is raised by business?
Who owns outcomes to be delivered?
Who owns applying learning in real time situation?
Who owns measuring the resource that got trained?
Who owns course correction to be done if training program is not appropriate for a particular resource or project?
Who owns signing off training content?
Who owns signing off learning outcomes?
Who owns signing off business outcomes?

Individual Needs: If an individual was not courteous in writing a mail does not mean he requires training in communication or email etiquettes. It is his state of mind that has to be taken into account to develop a training plan – Is the resource at breaking point due to performance pressure and is venting out in more ways than just one mail, how fair is it push him for communication training while he always believed his communication was above average? Consider the damage being done to his confidence due to his reporting manager’s short sightedness about the situation. A proper assessment means validating training recommendation in various ways including a session with the resource and then proposing a training program to ensure not just his well being but also his productivity. To do that, with whom do we have to sign off the outcomes?

Business Needs: In an outsourcing environment if client requires certified resources from vendor to run a particular process, then training is aimed at certification only. How hard it is to guess who should be responsible for the completion of this entire exercise? The project lead or L and D team? In case a project needs a different skill set and a resource is trained to meet that demand, whose responsibility it is to deliver by the end of the training?

Organization Needs: Based on organization agenda, to achieve a certain amount of preparedness from human capital for the next level of progress, if the leaders mention a few programs based on their experience, market trends and business needs – and L and D rolls osut flagship programs and random training modules without testing the need of the recommendation, who should we measure for effectiveness – The leader, L and D team or the participant?

Depending upon the need, answer the key questions listed above and measuring training effectiveness can become a structured offering for any training institute/ team.



For consulting on learning solutions and measurement, contact advocating.outcomes@gmail.com

Training ROI – Taboo topic for L&D and Business?

When business requests L&D team for a training program to up skill their process members or a specific team to enhance productivity or to address a challenging business need, it is a common practice to automatically conclude – just in case the desired change/ process outcome is not achieved post the training workshop - that possibly training content or methodology need to be refined better for the right impact. On the other hand, L&D team’s repository of decent feedback scores from participants, sign off from business leaders regarding the content and methodology is counter defense mechanism to reflect program’s likeability and effectiveness – another natural conclusion that it is the scope of business leaders to ensure the participants apply the learnt skill and behavior.

In most companies neither business nor training team is ready to rock the boat, which makes training a prolonged entertainment for participants, with no measurement model, year after year - particularly the behavioral and leadership trainings. Measurement is limited to attendance count and feedback form scores and the corporate communication just reflect those numbers.

BECKON is a model to measure learning in terms of outcomes and translate it to revenue. We own training end to end from design, delivery to deliverable. The ownership of impacting business outcomes will not shift from project lead to learning team/ trainers or vice versa, we gradually make it the participant’s responsibility while the L&D acts as assessors at regular intervals and Project Lead as drivers.

Our Training Design and Delivery charges are based on outcomes agreed which also means we bill our clients based on the revenue they could generate post our training – Out come based fee. Terms and conditions do apply.

We will have a series of conference calls for a thorough training need analysis or validate requirement / recommendation, not just with target audience who are to be trained but also Management, Finance, Marketing for a holistic view before we design the module, build a model to measure learning and impact business outcomes, across functions. We will engage industry experts, if required at no additional cost to our client for a structured training need analysis.

The upfront fee to conduct Training Demand Analysis or to validate the leader’s recommendation of training need specifics will range anywhere between INR 70000 to INR 150000 depending upon the size of the organization and the number of hours invested to gather inputs and consult with various teams on target based strategy.

If CFOs think, it is time to assess ROI for training as multiple costs are attached to training – salary costs, external facilitator costs, learning portals annual membership cost, logistics, monetary value (revenue loss) of time invested by participants who undergo training - Let us start with ROE first – Return on Expectations using BECKON model. Contact us, when you are ready to rock the boat.

For more details contact advocating.outcomes@gmail.com